Recent Reading

Music Database

Most of the week's new finds made it into the June
Streamnotes post which
came out on Friday -- the best new one is yet another good one from
François Carrier. The Streamnotes post included a 30-album wild-ass
guess at what a mid-year critics poll list might look like, with my
grades for the 27 albums I had checked out. I've since added the 3
I had missed, so the top-30 grade curve looks like this:

That's still pretty left-shifted from normal, but note I decided to
include Jens Lekman and Magnetic Fields (both Christgau picks) instead
of artists with more supporting data such as Ryan Adams, Julie Byrne,
Alex G, and/or Harry Styles. I'll also concede that I can imagine other
people liking most of the bottom half of the list more than I do (well,
Perfume Genius and Dirty Projectors seem pretty hard to like).

I got a couple of reprieves from my computer problems. The website
ISP found a bit of free disk space, but at 95% used it could go away
fast, and the company has become impossible to communicate with. I
got around my local browser problem by switching to Chromium, which
has held up fairly well, although I haven't put anyway near the load
on it I used to do with Firefox. I still need to save everything off,
do a fresh operating system load, and put it all back together again,
but it's tempting to keep muddling by for a while until I face up to
all that. It would be good, for instance, to update the
Christgau website before I
break my local copy. It would be even better if I could migrate the
website to HTML5 and UTF-8 when it comes back. Presumably there are
tools that help with that sort of thing, but I haven't searched them
out yet. We've also talked a bit about making it more phone-friendly
or even converting it to some kind of phone ap, but that's another
learning curve. Anyone who has advice or suggestions about this,
please get in touch through normal channels.

Tried turning on the old Dell laptop today, but it came up with an
ominous message about the "disk drive failing" that suggests it's soon
to be a goner. It's running Ubuntu 10.04, so it's even further behind
than my main machine. For most practical purposes I replaced it with
a Chromebook a few years ago, but I never got into the habit of using
cloud storage, so I really just use it for web surfing. I suppose a
new real laptop is in order.

Meanwhile, about the only thing I've actually been enjoying has been
cooking. The hardest thing has been lining up guests so I get an excuse
to stretch a little -- I still haven't done the big Korean bash I planned
out 3-4 months ago. I did cook Indian for my sister's birthday, but that's
about all. On the other hand, I've been picking up small packages of meat
and scattered vegetables that I can cook for the two of us. Today I turned
a pound of hamburger into
picadillo --
sort of a Cuban sloppy joe mix -- served with pan-fried potatoes and
fried egg (a "caballo").

Lately I've found myself going back to Chinese recipes, some I haven't
made in years. On Sunday I made a version of sweet & sour pork and
some fried rice. I made lettuce wraps with a chicken and pine nut filling
and fried cellophane noodles. I found some frozen pork chops and turned
them into pork & pickle soup (the "pickle" is Szechuan preserved
vegetable -- mustard stem), adding some dried mushrooms. Another time
I made braised pork ribs with fermented black beans. Then there was the
"hoisin-exploded" chicken. I have a pretty good pantry of Chinese odds
and ends, so I can usually turn a package of meat or fish and whatever
vegetables are handy into a remarkably tasty meal. The hard part is
keeping fresh scallions and ginger on hand.

My mother was the master of always having a pantry (and two freezers)
stocked with anything she might need should, say, a relative show up
in need of a full meal and maybe a pie or cake. After she died, I made
three typical cakes, knowing that all the ingredients would be on hand.
We grew up on stories of Aunt Hester receiving guests at 3AM with full
meals prepared on her wood-fired stove. I don't think Mom ever had to
do that, but she was prepared.